CNU professor studies afterlife with $57,000 grant

NEWPORT NEWS — Eric Silverman is exploring some topics that defy final answers — at least in this life.

Is there anything to do in heaven or the afterlife? What about relationships, how do those work?

The Christopher Newport University professor received a $57,000 grant from The Immortality Project, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and University of California at Riverside, to study philosophies of the afterlife. Silverman is working with Regent University professor Ryan Byerly on the project, which they hope will lead to a published anthology with several contributing writers.

"Anything that we come up with, there's some speculation here, there's no getting around that," Silverman said.

Silverman said many Western concepts of the afterlife are rather disappointing.

"It's not a very attractive view. You have these images of an afterlife that is kind of less real than the real life — clouds floating around semi-isolated, not really doing very much," he said. "I understand the reasons for the metaphors, but they're kind of crass metaphors if you really think about it."

Silverman hopes by using philosophical concepts, some new ideas can be found on what paradise would be like.

"Can you become a better person morally? What would the afterlife be like constitutionally? Is it a material physical life, is it immaterial, are there institutional structures?" Silverman said.

"There's a whole series of questions that are worth pursuing and really have not been dug into, at least not in a philosophical way in the past century," he said.

The money from the grant will be used to help fund the research, as well as to grant honorariums to contributing writers and cover the costs of hosting a workshop on campus, tentatively scheduled for the spring.

Silverman, who is a Christian, said religion inevitably plays a role in any discussion of afterlife, but he and Byerly's work is not focused on trying to do a comparative study of views from faiths such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

"Anything we come up with that's likely to be true should be compatible with mainstream religion in general," he said. "That's what would we hope."

The Immortality Project will examine religious views of the afterlife as part of the larger overall work, according to John Martin Fischer, the project's leader.

The overall project, funded with $5 million, will study an array of life-and-death issues, such as animals with regenerative ability, near-death experiences in cardiac-arrest patients, and views on theology.

Fischer said he has received some criticism for the project.

"We've been criticized from different directions. One set of criticisms is that we're taking the afterlife too seriously," Fischer said. "We get criticized by atheists and people who are naturalists who say why waste all this money studying near-death experiences when it is clear they don't point to the afterlife."

On the other hand, Fischer said he's received negative feedback, particularly on blogs from deeply religious people and others who say near-death experiences definitely prove there is an afterlife.

"We get criticized from all sides, which probably means we're doing just the right thing," Fischer said. "As a philosopher, for me disagreement is a good thing."